To Ease Your Troubled Mind
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: "I've got a mind to pack and go - never you mind the debts we owe!" What if Christine and Raoul really had taken up his angry suggestion that first night, and walked out of the hotel to go back to Paris without the money? Their marriage still has its problems...
1. The Debts We Owe

Written as a response to the "Operation Beautiful Ocean Depths" challenge from author **Out of Books**...

* * *

**Chapter 1: The Debts We Owe**

_It was the night that changed the pattern of all our lives for ever. The night that began the end of my marriage and gave me back the best of friends and a great career. The last night I endured Raoul's drunken temper and the first night we arrived in New York._

_And it began as badly as any night I've ever known._

~o~

The hotel room should have been a refuge after the cacophony of the docks; after the ride in the horseless carriage, with an atmosphere you could have cut with a knife and Raoul's arm tightening round my waist at every lurch in a hold about as comforting as a steel bar. Gustave, of course, had been everywhere, climbing on and off the seats with a fearless energy for all things new and exciting that took no account of adult nerves.

"Christine, for God's sake—" Raoul's own grip had been white on the edge of his seat — "can't you keep your son still?"

If he'd registered my wince at that, he'd misread it... I hoped.

_Your son_: Gustave had always been 'your son' when he'd irritated Raoul — which, these days, was all too often — or simply 'the boy'. Never 'our son'; never the proud 'my boy'. And the more Raoul withdrew from Gustave's constant demands, the more the oblivious cuckoo in the nest clamoured for attention.

But it was just a turn of phrase, the same that I'd heard from peasants in my childhood: "And what hast _thy son_ done now, oh wife of mine?" The truth about his heir was one hard piece of knowledge, at least, that I could spare him.

I'd been unhappy about the horseless carriage too; but wives were expected to be nervous about such things. Raoul's pride had taken too many batterings over the last few months — the last ten years, if I was honest — for him to admit to any further humiliation. Especially after the docks. We'd been looking forward to dry land at last... but not a reception like that.

It had been a rough crossing, and we'd all been ill. Gustave had been the worst hit, but the little ball of misery who'd sobbed in my arms for the first morning had found his sea-legs the next day with the resilience of the very young; it had been three days before I'd ventured out to a chair on the promenade deck alongside other whey-faced wives, with stewards fussing round us and piles of rugs and mackintoshes against the spray.

Fresh air had helped, but even on the last day — when Gustave and I waltzed laughing across the dining-room together hand in hand against the waves, weaving as lurching a path to our table as any inebriate — there had been notably fewer passengers at meal-times than on the night we'd left port. Raoul, furious at his own weakness, had been wretchedly ill all the way across; and if it wasn't the first time he'd had intimate acquaintance with the inside of a basin on waking, it was an ironically bitter humiliation to be suffering the morning after without achieving the oblivion of the night before.

The steward who had suggested brandy had done none of us a service. And the steward who'd mentioned in Gustave's hearing with the best of intentions that Monsieur le Vicomte would feel much better if only he could bring himself to expose his sufferings on deck — well, perhaps in a servant's deferential phrasing the wise saw might have had the intended effect, but in a ten-year-old's blithe repetition it must have seemed like the last straw.

If only Raoul had let me comfort him as I had Gustave, some good might have come of it. But on that first day I had been too busy with the child, and once my own _mal-de-mer_ had passed, Raoul's misery had progressed beyond anything but bitterness at the idea of wet cloths, soothing words or an unavailing hand on the brow. All I could do was pretend, as so often before, that my husband had no need of me, and shield him from the knowledge of dependence — and spend the time, as so often before, with Gustave.

The sunny-tempered boy I'd married was being eaten alive by the knowledge of his own failures... but there was nothing, nothing I could do until he could bring himself to ask his wife for help. And for Raoul, who'd tried so hard to be the hero, that final yielding of his pride was going to come too late... for all of us.

After events at the Opéra, we'd had a summer of scandalous notoriety and intrusive questions; Raoul had shielded me then, cutting off the Press with a few curt words and sending closed carriages whenever I wanted to venture out. I'd learned to deal with newspapermen as any stage performer must, but this had been different, a prurient invasion of areas of my life that no-one save those of us who had been there could understand. It had been years before I'd learned to smile sweetly and evade interest: years of dogged protection on Raoul's part before public fascination with the case faded.

America, it seemed, had discovered a whole new field of interest in our personal affairs, and Raoul's family name, that had carried so much weight with editors in Paris, counted for nothing here. Less than nothing: a title, to the great American public, meant exoticism and decadence, a glimpse of Europe and Society and everything they'd gone beyond in the Land of the Free.

On the New York docks, I was no longer Madame de Chagny — whether we liked it or not, he was Mr Christine Daaé, trophy husband of a celebrity face, and Gustave was the son of a famous mother. Four hundred years of history meant nothing to the gutter press at all.

We'd walked straight into a fresh storm of flash-powder and publicity with only a few hours of calm water in between. And when Raoul had tried to defend my privacy and my art, he'd been met by jeers and muck-raking. Bad enough that we'd been bought in by some dollar millionaire to be paraded before the public like Jenny Lind for the three-ring circus king; to have those debts flung in his face as common gossip was a humiliation that no amount of money could buy off.

And it looked likely to be only the start.

He'd given them reason enough to take against him, and I could just imagine the column inches that would make gleeful work of our little disembarkation incident. This stay in America looked set to be a nightmare for all of us; and if Raoul's rapidly disintegrating temper had anything to do with it, this hotel room of ours would be the scene for only the first weary act of what was to follow.

He'd poured himself another drink. I bit my tongue. It would be for his nerves, or his headaches, or to wash away the taste of those teeming masses — there was always a reason... save that none of that had mattered ten years ago, when we married, and the demons he tried to escape were no longer in the dark beneath the Opera House. They rode at his shoulder now, whispering accusation. And the drink that dulled the voices only fed the desperation behind them.

~o~

"We should go!" Every seething resentment had boiled over, and he'd brushed off Gustave's attempts at distraction without so much as an acknowledgement. "We should just pack and go, and never mind about the debts — who'd have thought we'd come to this? What did you think you were doing, selling yourself as a sideshow act to a man who sends freaks to ferry us round town?"

It hurt all the more because it was unfair and he knew it. We'd had no choice... and it was for his sake that I'd had to do it. But in the knife-edge negotiation around Raoul's unhappiness that our marriage had become, we didn't speak of the source of those debts; of the select clubs where the stakes were too high, and the older men whose profession it was to prey on the pride of youths desperate to prove their manhood and too ashamed to admit they'd been drawn in beyond their means.

He'd been a pigeon ripe for the plucking.

_One more throw, one more spin of the wheel, Vicomte, and the luck will change..._ Only it hadn't. He'd been played for a fool; but some things were too hard to acknowledge, even when the demands started coming nearer and nearer home. Even when they reached your wife.

He'd needed to win too badly by that point to be able to stop. He hadn't needed any horror of mine to tell him that what he was doing was ruinous; but I'd been too naïve, then, to understand. There had been scenes, quarrels, tears. He'd had a run of luck — a short one — and paid off the worst of it. And then it had all begun again.

We didn't talk, now, of why we needed the money. It was just another constant burden in the background of our lives. Another failure for the man who should have been providing for his wife.

I could have lived in debt, if that had been all. I could have lived in poverty, with rough hands and coarse skirts, with a husband who loved me and our growing son. But I couldn't live much longer with this unspoken edge of inadequacy in the air between us. And he couldn't — or wouldn't — let me help.

All I could do, as so often before, was try to calm him down, try to paper over the situation and pretend that everything would somehow come right, when we both knew it would take far more than that. Those early quarrels had been too dreadful. I couldn't bear to go through that again... and so I soothed, and pretended, and sometimes, just sometimes, we could make believe together that nothing was wrong.

"Don't you patronise me!" The wounds of the dockside were too raw for that rosy fiction to hold tonight. "It's your fault we came here—"

And if he had only believed that, it might at least have helped: but we both knew the truth, and nothing I could say could spare him the laceration of that self-knowledge. It was going to be like this every waking minute, and the price for both of us was too high.

"Let's go, then. Let's leave tonight, Raoul, if it makes you feel better—" Abruptly, I was on the verge of tears, brought on by too many years of struggle. "We'll leave this whole place, leave the whole thing behind... oh please, let's just get out of here and _go_!"

Whatever Raoul had expected, it hadn't been that. It had been a long time since I'd seen him so frankly taken aback.

"Fine. We'll do it." He frowned, as if trying to focus. "That's the first sensible thing I've heard you say all night."

It was the first honest thing I'd said all night; the first unguarded wish I'd let myself make in so, so long... I sank down on the bench of the piano I'd been playing earlier, propping both elbows with a discord on the keyboard of the tinny hotel instrument, and let my head fall between my hands.

The music of the aria I'd been trying to rehearse was still open there, and the notes swam before my eyes. All those hours already, spent trying for absolute, impossible perfection to justify the terrifying size of that fee... it was all part of the same nightmare, and I didn't care in that moment if I never sang it again. If I never performed it at all.

"I'm so tired..." I looked up at him — the flushed face, the incipient scowl, the husband I scarcely seemed to know any longer — and closed my eyes like a child hoping for a miracle.

"Oh Raoul — take me home."

I'll never know, now, if the soft touch that brushed my forehead was really the kiss I wanted to believe it. I kept my eyes closed, and told myself that it was.

~o~

Maybe it could have been that easy all along. Maybe all I needed to have done was to have asked him more often for the things that he could do, rather than both of us straining after a chimera he couldn't provide. But all I could think — sitting there with my eyes shut and listening while Raoul arranged it all — was how wonderful it was, just for once, to have no responsibilities whatsoever. To have someone else haranguing the hotel staff to carry down the trunks they'd only just brought up, ordering a carriage to be brought round, and scribbling cables to the shipping office. To have an over-excited Gustave firmly quelled and sent to oversee the packing of his own things, with the threat-cum-promise of a parental visitation to follow (poor neglected Gustave, he must have been over the moon at the attention)... and to be picked up at last and carried down to the hotel lobby with my head jolting on my husband's shoulder, a gesture that was not romantic in the least but a blessedly practical expedient.

There was some kind of delay at the hotel desk — I think they would have kept us if they dared — but Raoul blustered a way through and got us out of there at the cost of every dollar we could find. And then it was just the long ride through traffic with an increasingly sleepy Gustave curled up between us, quiet for once; Raoul's face in the flicker of lights through the window was taut and set, but it was alert again. Whatever his thoughts, he said nothing, and I didn't ask.

We were running away, but it felt more like victory. And if there is a Providence that watches over sea-crossings, then that entity at least must have seen fit to approve — for we all had our sea-legs at last for the seven-day crossing on the shabby Norwegian steamer that took us homeward, and Raoul watched with me over the rail as the Baltic came in sight.


	2. All I Ask of You

**Chapter 2: All I Ask of You**

We had to spend three days in Christiania, in the end. It was not Coney Island, of course, but Gustave still thought it was wonderful. He'd never seen anything like Norway before, and in those few brief days I felt my own distant childhood coming back. The little farm girl awoke again within the brittle, worldly shell of the Parisienne I had become; this was not the country or the people I'd known, in those days before we left Sweden, but the peasants who came in to sell their wares were not so very different, and I could have sung for joy at the memory of those great Scandinavian skies.

Raoul had told me once that my eyes were as dreamy as the waters of my Northern lakes, and that my blushes were the colour of mountain strawberries. Poor boy, he'd never been much of a poet: we were both very young, and I'm afraid I laughed. It had been a long time since I'd thought of myself as Swedish, and even back then I could remember only a few scraps of my mother tongue — but it meant more to me than I'd expected to find myself there in the North again.

And then our journey home was all arranged, and we came back to Paris, to the musty smell of a shut-up house — strange, how houses seem to pine and dwindle when their owners are away — and a pile of correspondence on the tray. Two cablegrams had arrived from America since we left. I gave them to Gustave to burn unopened in the drawing-room fire, watching the little fragments glow and crumble to dust with a sensation of release.

Most of the missives that had come were for Raoul: demands for payment, I think. I expected to see them join my own in the flames, and before we had gone to America there would have been no doubt about it. But he took them instead into the study and shut himself away with them for several days, so that Gustave and I saw him only briefly at mealtimes.

It was not as if we had ever seen much of him, these last few years; we were quite used to spending time together, just we two, and it was easy to slip back into the old unthinking ways. But it was odd to have Raoul at home with us again — to catch his heavy, impatient step on the stairs as I was dressing and the scrape of cinders in the study grate, to hear another body moving about the house in the hours when we were accustomed to be alone, and to come in from the park with Gustave to the sound of my husband's pen scratching at long, laborious intervals behind the closed door.

He went through a good deal of brandy in those hours, I believe; but perhaps he needed it. At any rate, he seemed very pale and serious when we did glimpse each other. Or perhaps it was only that, to my shame, I had grown accustomed to see him flushed with drink, or temper, or — more often than not — both.

But the days went by, and no further letters came. And one afternoon little Maître Tollot, whom I had always liked, paid my husband a call, and stayed on after their business was done to take a glass of wine with the two of us.

Raoul played host civilly enough, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. The little lawyer, who had known him since boyhood, shot a few keen glances in the direction of us both from time to time, but seemed happy enough otherwise to chatter away on his own at his usual nineteen to the dozen, and I let the cheerful stream wash over me thankfully. It was pleasant to laugh again, and exchange adult small-talk, and shake our heads over the state of the world and the shocking decadence to which the arts had descended. Only it would have been nice to know why, in unguarded moments, I had caught the old notary looking sorry for me.

Raoul waved me back into my seat when the old gentleman rose to go. "Wait here for me, dear—" a glance at Maître Tollot — "I'll just see our friend out. I won't be a moment."

So I sat quietly alone, listening to the faint burr of male voices and the sound of the door, and watching the sunlight dance across the faded roses on the walls through the boughs of the creeper outside. If anyone had asked me in that final moment whether my life was a contented one, I suppose I would have said yes.

~o~

Then Raoul blew back in with a noisy tread and dropped down onto the upright chair he'd pulled up for Maître Tollot, clapping the door shut behind him. He leaned forward, both hands on his knees.

"Christine..." It was a voice I hadn't heard from him for a long time; one uncertain of its response.

_Gustave_. My heart turned over in pure panic, and he must have seen it on my face. He caught one of my hands in his own as if in reassurance.

"Christine, I — I want to offer you a separation."

Separation? I stared at him: every familiar line of his face, his shoulders. He was my husband. He was — he'd been — my childhood friend. We'd taken the nuptial Mass together. We'd united our goods and our bodies in the sight of the world and of God, and what we actually thought and felt about one another now was a question that had never even crossed my mind.

"But we — I thought—"

"You thought things had been better between us lately," Raoul finished, and I nodded.

He sighed. "Yes, they've been better because you haven't been walking round me on eggshells all the time, driving us both up the wall by trying to pretend there's nothing wrong! You can't spend the rest of your life cringing at my moods, Christine, and I can't spend the rest of my life failing to live up to your hopes. The only thing I can rescue you from right now is myself — and my debts."

His hand tightened around mine. "You know there's more owing than we can possibly pay. The next few months are going to be very bad... and there's no reason why everything you earn should disappear into the same black hole as the little I have left. With what they offered you for that last season at the Opéra, you could have had a smart apartment all to yourself, instead of a husband like a millstone round your neck and this house that eats money—"

A jerk of his head indicated the shabby rug, the worn slits in the ancient upholstery, the telltale bulge in the plasterwork of the moulded ceiling. I looked back at him, trying to see beyond the husband whose presence in my future I'd always taken absolutely for granted.

We'd been through the storm: we'd come to quieter waters, and had time to remember ourselves. We'd wanted only the best for each other, at the first. I'd tried so hard to fill the part I thought I should play... but it had made neither of us happy. And now this... Was he — could he be serious? Could he be _right_?

The little shock of surprise at that last idea told me all I needed to know about the true state of my faith in Raoul's judgment, and I felt my cheeks growing pink with that knowledge. I looked down hastily, at our joined hands. "You mean... we would live apart?"

"You'd still be my wife in the eyes of the Church." Raoul got up, and came to sit on the arm of my chair, stroking my fingers gently. "We won't give Paris that much scandal... But no-one will be surprised if we — we just admit what's been obvious for some time. And with a legal separation they won't be able to touch anything you own. You and Gustave will be able to live anywhere you want: Venice, Vienna, Milan—"

"You want me to take Gustave? Abroad?" Another stab of guilt and panic. He'd never been close to the boy, but... Gustave was the heir to his name and title. Unless Tollot — unless Tollot had somehow, impossibly, found out? Unless _that_ was the reason—

I looked up into Raoul's face, all of a sudden terrified what I might see there, and felt guiltier than ever at the tentative query that answered.

"Abroad, yes... if you can. If you don't mind, that is. Other children can be very cruel — and my name isn't going to be one that either of you will want to be associated with for a while."

His words were quiet, almost matter-of-fact, but I could guess at the whirlwind of ostracism and scorn that lay within them: at the twin pillory of indigence and contempt for a man who defaulted on a debt of honour. My heart twisted. "Raoul, I can't leave you alone to face—"

"Yes, you can." Raoul dropped my hand and put his arm round my shoulders, giving a little impatient shake. "Can't you see it'll be a hundred times worse to face with a wife and son caught up in the whole thing alongside me? It would be the act of a true friend to take him somewhere safely out of reach... can't we even be friends, Christine, or is that too much to ask?"

Tenderness in our marriage was something I could no longer cope with; but the hint of frustration and bad temper had a blessedly familiar ring to it. I laughed, and leaned my head against his shoulder. "Friends, then... But you will write? Gustave will miss you, you know."

He'd wanted to know just the other day why his father never played with him any more, and I hadn't known what to say: it was going to be even harder to keep up the fiction of a father who loved him when all he could see was Raoul sending him away. Boys needed fathers, and for Gustave, neglected or not, Raoul was all he'd ever had.

Raoul growled something under his breath. "Is it that important to the boy? I wouldn't know what to say..."

"You'll find him much easier to talk to as he grows up," I promised, hoping fervently that it was true. At least once Gustave had learned to talk a little less, and listen a little more... and the same, perhaps, for Raoul. It was one trait they had disastrously in common. "And he'll be head of the family some day — I can't teach him that."

"If my high-and-mighty cousins are too proud to visit the son of an opera-singer now, they're scarcely going to welcome him as the son of a man who's brought our whole name into disrepute," Raoul said bluntly, releasing me and standing up. He walked over to the mantelpiece and stood with his back turned, poking in a desultory way at the fire-irons. "Anyhow, by the time he inherits in fifty years or so, I doubt anyone's going to be listening to anything any of us have to say..."

But whether he had intended it or not, he had comforted me at least about leaving him. Talk about Gustave's long-distant inheritance meant that he, Raoul, wasn't planning to do anything... noble or rash.

I sighed. "I'm sorry — it's just that you've had time to think over this whole idea, and I haven't, yet. It's all very new to me."

I must have been paler than I'd realised, for he turned and looked at me with a frown. "Here, you'd better have another glass of wine."

He poured with a somewhat lavish hand, and I managed half of it. Somewhat to my surprise, Raoul left the half-full glass untouched.

"One other thing..." He was turning the stopper of the decanter round and round with great concentration, not meeting my eye. "You'd still be my wife, but I want you to know that I don't — I don't expect—"

A tide of dull red had mounted up beyond his ears as he flushed like a schoolboy. "If you wanted to take a lover, I'd — I'd quite understand."

It was years since we'd been man and wife in that sense, and it had been the last thing on my mind; taken by surprise, I almost laughed out loud, but managed to hold it back at the last minute. Poor Raoul, he was embarrassed enough already — and maybe he had his own case in mind. Men had needs, I knew, and if he'd been elsewhere, it was the only part of his life in the last few years he'd ever succeeded in being discreet about.

So I managed a blush of my own in assent and smiled back at him as he stole an awkward glance in my direction. "That's settled, then... And if we need to concoct some insulting or threatening letters to exchange for the benefit of a legal fiction, I've got some opera libretti you can use to come up with ideas — if I can borrow your Voltaire."

It was Raoul's turn to be surprised into laughter, a peal of pure boyish delight. He caught me by both hands and tugged me to my feet, swirling me round into his arms. "Oh Christine, you really are a wife in a million..."

He sobered a little, lifting my face to his. "Are you sure this is what you want?"

I'd spent years trying to guess what he needed to hear. Too often, I'd got it wrong.

"Yes, dear," I said hesitantly, and knew I'd hurt him again in the flinching instant before I understood why.

"No more eggshells — not between friends... Tell me truly, is this what _you_ want?"

His eyes were the most honest and direct I'd known them in a long time, and it seemed an age since I'd seen him stand so straight, waiting for my answer. It was as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders in the last half-hour, and from mine too. We'd been pulling each other out of shape, he and I; we'd never meant our love to bring out the worst in one another, but somehow it had happened all the same.

I could see in him now the ghost of the man our marriage had nearly destroyed. He was someone I could treasure... as a friend.

"Please, Raoul." I looked up into his face, letting him see the truth of what I was asking. "Kiss me — and set me free."

And the warm comfort of that last embrace told me it had been taken in precisely the spirit in which it was intended.


	3. So Glad You're Here

**Chapter 3: So Glad You're Here **

Gustave de Chagny's wedding day was the most glorious of that summer.

Sun streamed in through the windows of the little church, gilding the shabby vestments of the priest — clearly passed down from before the war — and lying rich and heavy across the tiles. There were still scars from the shelling in the village outside, but the billets here had been far enough behind the front lines to be safe, for the most part, and the damage that had been done was healing with the merciful hand of Time: five years of peace, now, and the flowers twined around chipped stonework and helped shroud raw-patched walls. A generation of France's youth lay interred among the mud and craters of a war to end all wars, and Flanders poppies would never blow carefree in our hearts again; but new life was growing up with each passing spring, and young creatures still laughed and loved and married, even as we had back in our day.

And I had been lucky: so, so lucky, among all those grieving mothers of gallant boys... Tears blurred for a moment, splintering sunlight across that beloved head bowed now at the altar beside the girl of his choice — but when else could a mother weep, if not at her own son's wedding?

Gustave never spoke of the war. He'd chosen to return to France and fight for his country, a slender, musical boy full of romantic ideals; he'd spent months billeted here, at this very place. He and Bertrand... and it was Bertrand's little sister Laure who knelt at the rail for the blessing at his side. Some good, at least, had come out of those lost years.

The War had stolen his youth and brought him back to me gaunt and silent, with haunted eyes. But he had come back, sound of wind and limb, and with Bertrand at his side: Bertrand the inseparable with whom he had shared a billet and played duets together on the old piano behind the lines. Bertrand had been studying to be a concert pianist, once. They still played together — Gustave's own arrangements for three hands, since the last year of the war that had left his friend with the empty sleeve pinned so neatly at his side...

But there was no bitterness in Bertrand's face now, as he watched the two he loved best in the world pledge their final vows together; he felt my gaze, turned, and smiled, and I found myself dabbing at my eyes in good earnest. The young had been through so much... and they still held so much hope for this world of ours.

Mademoiselle Laure was lovely, with the unaffected radiance of a girl on her wedding day; beside my tall, slim son the coltish tangle of her long limbs was transformed to elegance, and she had left behind the instinctive round-shouldered stoop that had served as camouflage for that ungainly height. Even in that absurd shapeless dress and low-browed veil — the new fashion which I could not admire, try as I might — she made a bride that any man could be proud of. But I hoped the craze for loose bodices and low waists would be short-lived; at forty-five, one comes to require a little more support. I did not think I could bring myself to throw off my lacing altogether, even if fashion demanded it.

The look on her face was sheer wondering delight. I watched Gustave kiss his bride through the veil of my handkerchief as happiness got the better of me at last; and I was not the only one.

Many of the village women my age were still clad in black, with a timeworn ring on a finger touched now in bittersweet recall. We all remember our own weddings at a time like this, I suppose, and the days of our girlhood. Mine had been by special licence, in a hurried privacy that might have brought scandal in itself if it had not already been so inextricably entwined around us... and I had been no older than Laure was now.

I seldom wore my ring these days, and it was growing harder to force it onto my finger. But it sparkled proudly there today in the name of respectability, my badge of position as Gustave's mother, as bright and delicate as the day Raoul had chosen it for me with such pride.

~o~

Without intending it, I glanced sidelong towards the back of the church, where Raoul de Chagny's fair head showed against the old stone. I had been doubly lucky, after all; I had gone through the years of the war without losing my son, or my... friend.

We'd lost touch with Raoul when war broke out, and Gustave had seen him far more recently than I. They'd met at Headquarters during the War: Raoul trapped behind a desk, struggling with supply shortages and imagining contempt in the eyes of every aged young subaltern, and Gustave with his field promotion still fresh upon his sleeve and a mud-stained message in his pocket. Both would have changed places, if they could.

But they'd found some kind of fellowship there, and again briefly in those weeks when Raoul had transferred at last to the front line, unable to bear the shame when men his age were being conscripted for the trenches. It had still been Staff work, of course. But a stray shell had struck the car he'd been travelling in, shattered his hip, and put an honourable end to Raoul's war.

He would carry the limp to the end of his days, and in bad weather he could scarcely move; but he made light of it to Gustave. There were so many others in worse case, so many others who had not come back at all... and it was as if, by the pain, he had bought back his self-respect. Oh, I would never understand men, their lack of imagination and their wars, but I was glad all the same that Raoul had somehow found peace — and that he had found a son at last in Gustave.

He had almost missed the ceremony at the start. I stole another look across as we filed forward for the Eucharist; yes, she was there, that aging, overdressed woman on his arm who had caused such a stir when they came in together at the last minute. Some trouble with the hired fly that had driven them from the railway station, apparently, but we hadn't had time to talk and I had no idea who she was. Village society being what it was, I'd overheard some ripe speculation, but I was doing my best to keep an open mind.

We'd written since the War, but we'd never met. I'd sent him tickets for my _Norma_ at La Scala — it would be the last time I'd sing the role, the demands were growing too much for my voice — but the seats had remained empty. Travel was no longer so easy these days, and there was unrest in Italy. I would retire soon, I thought, and move back to France.

Really, Raoul looked ridiculously young when he smiled... His fair hair was fading now, back to the flaxen thatch of the boy who'd played with me on the beach, and I thought ruefully of the silver threads I plucked so assiduously from my own. No-one would ever mistake my complexion for that of a bride again, even under the shade of a flattering hat. But Raoul could have stood in Gustave's place at the altar, and the match would not have seemed an unseemly one...

I must pay more attention to the service, I told myself severely, schooling my wandering attention to its proper place. Such comparisons did not belong in church, let alone such vulgar curiosity.

~o~

As it turned out, as soon as the Mass was over, I was to bump into Raoul's mysterious guest myself: quite literally.

"Laure — Gustave!" I embraced them both as the crowd jostled, laughing, around us, and Laure bent to press her fresh, unpowdered cheek against my own. "Laure, darling, I'm so very glad. I hope you'll be so very happy together—"

Gustave had turned to welcome another of the local women — they all remembered him kindly from the months he'd spent here behind the lines — and I stepped back to give them room. A little too quickly.

"Pardon, Madame—"

We apologised almost in the same instant, but I couldn't help staring. That heavy purple dress with its rows of black beading must have been twenty years behind the times at least, and by far too ornate for a simple country wedding. And the hat made her look like a concierge on a Sunday outing.

"Forgive me..." Raoul took my elbow gently from behind, moving past. His own suit was old — the little snag of thread on one of the lapels was one that I knew, I saw with a pang — but impeccably pressed, and it fitted him almost as well as ever.

"Christine, Laure — this is my dragon-housekeeper, Jeanne Brassard. Mère Brassard, this is Gustave's mother, the great Christine Daaé... Gustave you know... and this is my dear daughter-in-law, Madame de Chagny."

Laure blushed adorably, and my own cheeks coloured a little at the reminder. It was a long time since anyone had called me that; but there would be a new Madame de Chagny now.

Raoul had not paused. "Laure, would you take care of her? I know you'll be kind to her for Gustave's sake, but she doesn't know anyone here... and I couldn't leave her behind, not for Monsieur Gustave's wedding. He always meant such a lot to her when he came to visit."

"Of course she will," Gustave said at once, smiling over at his wife. "Won't you, darling? Laure can put anyone at ease in a moment..."

So this was Mère Brassard... I scarcely listened as Raoul embraced the pair and made his formal congratulations. I knew Gustave had been seeing a good deal more of Raoul these last years since he'd been back in France with Bertrand, but Mère Brassard had been an affectionate feature in his accounts since those first, awkward visits. Still... 'dragon'?

"Rehearsing again, Mother?" My son touched me on the shoulder, with an impish grin at my visible jump.

"We never finished the introductions..." He gave the little stage-bow I'd taught him that always made me smile. "But I think you two know each other anyway. Mother — Father."

And just like that, Raoul was kissing my hand, and we were alone together in a sudden swirl of strangers as the congregation poured out of the little church around us.

"Madame," Raoul said quietly, straightening. His eyes warmed. "Christine... look at you. Regal as a queen — and lovely as the day I last set eyes on you."

"We both know that's not true, Monsieur le Vicomte..." I could see the years on him, too, now that we were closer. Marks of pain, and stress — and old dissipations. Oh Raoul... "But you're trying to distract me with flattery. I demand to hear about your 'dragon' — Gustave always made her out to be the kindest creature..."

"Oh, she dotes on small boys." Raoul cleared his throat a little awkwardly. "I didn't know what to do with him, but Mère Brassard saved us both. Saved me, anyway."

The lines on his face had grown harsher, abruptly, and for the first time he looked older than I.

"I was in a pretty bad way when we... parted. I don't know how much you knew — I tried to keep as much from you as I could. I wasn't proud of the way that I'd acted—"

I didn't want confessions, not now. There was quick understanding in his eyes, and he threw up a hand in acknowledgement.

"All right... But Mère Brassard took me in, gave me a room when no respectable lodgings would have me. Found me employment when I couldn't pay her and no-one I knew would give me the time of day... the War swept away a lot of things, Christine. Not all of them for the worse." He shifted his weight a little, wincing, and I saw for the first time that he was leaning on the stick at his side.

"Raoul, you shouldn't be standing — come and sit down... Gustave should have told me—"

"This?" He let me draw him down onto a chair with an unconscious sigh of relief, looking down at the cane he held. "Dear, it's nothing. It helps with standing, that's all."

He flourished it with a schoolboy grin. "And it's a wonderful means of expression: of punctuation, like this—" little jabs — "exaggeration—" another flourish — "disdain, disapproval—"

I caught hold of his hand before he could make me laugh any more; tears were too close behind. "You're still trying to distract me. Tell me about your dragon."

Raoul shrugged it off, turning my fingers over in his own. "Oh, she used to tell me the same things that you tried to tell me, only in stronger terms... and I could take it from her, that's all. I was supposed to be taking care of you, not the other way round."

"We were supposed to be taking care of each other," I said softly, feeling his touch on our wedding ring, and Raoul sighed.

"We were too young... I'm sorry."

But it hadn't been just his hurt young pride, and my clumsy attempts to appease it. There had been the vast, unspoken secret that had stained the very beginning of our marriage, from that bond of music that he'd never forgiven or understood: and the question, always, that hung over Gustave. I'd never known for certain if he'd guessed that the boy might not be his son. I couldn't ask him now, on this day of all days...

There'd been that rumour I'd heard, a few years back, about the little girl whose school fees he was paying: idle gossip, but I found myself hoping now with a jolt of surprise that it was true. He'd have done as much for the child of any woman with whom he was living — I knew that better than most — but the girl must be eight or nine now, and Raoul deserved a daughter of his own to love. It had been a hard blow to us both to find that I could give him no more children after Gustave was born.

"I'm sorry too," I said instead, and closed my hand round his.

His grip tightened. "Well, Mère Brassard got me straightened out, and in the end I had enough to pay for some furnished rooms — that was when I wrote to tell Gustave that he could come — with her to look after me. And it was her contacts behind the scenes that helped get me into that junior Staff job during the War: that, and the remnants of a title, for what good that did anyone. The best men we had were from families we'd never heard of—"

"Now you sound like Gustave." My son's new-found passion for politics had first bemused and then rather appalled me; but I couldn't doubt the ideals behind his activities, and he spoke so enthusiastically about all they hoped to achieve that I'd found myself converted despite my misgivings. Judging by Raoul's expression, he'd been subjected to much the same experience.

He made an inelegant sound. "Ah yes — the Radical party. My son, Deputy Comrade the Vicomte de Chagny..."

"They're not altogether Communists, you know," I said mildly. "And it's quite the coming movement: we might see him in the Assembly for real before the decade's out."

Raoul snorted again, sounding comfortably middle-aged. "I blame the Italians, myself... You're not going to stay there, are you? I don't like what I'm hearing, and you don't want to find yourself in the middle of a revolution, whether it's one of Gustave's colour or not."

He'd been careful not to say _'I don't want to find you'_, and I appreciated it.

"I'm forty-five, Raoul. I'm not going to be playing svelte young soprano roles much longer... I was thinking of a farewell tour: London, Paris, Brussels, maybe even Vienna again. Then maybe I'll find a place here, somewhere near Gustave, and try a little tuition. I've always wanted to take on some pupils; see if I can teach some of these modern Carlottas how to put more of their soul on stage."

Raoul laughed. "In that case, I forecast more farewell tours for you than Adelina Patti... though that was America, of course, and the Americans will put up with anything."

A touch of the old hauteur; silence fell between us. I don't know what he was thinking, but mine was an all too vivid memory of a scribbled score on a hotel piano in New York.

"You never did go to the States?" Raoul said at last, drawing his grasp gently free from mine, and I shook my head.

"They wanted me at the Met, before the war, but..." I swallowed. How could I admit to Raoul, of all people, the complicated knot of emotions that had filled me at the prospect of that voyage? "I — I couldn't."

No more dollar millionaires; no more journalists; no more ghosts of unhappiness past. Paris held memories good and bad. New York held only nightmares.

"And you never thought of going back to Sweden?" Raoul was asking, curious. "After our time in Christiania, I thought perhaps... On hot nights in Paris I used to picture you there, among the lakes and birch-logs in that old story-book we had. But then I heard you'd gone to rival Nellie Melba in England at Covent Garden."

He had mispronounced the name of the great English opera house so badly that it was a moment before I understood what he meant, and his answering shamefaced chuckle broke the constraint of New York. I smiled back.

"I did think of taking Gustave to Sweden, but... we'd been studying English already, and it would have been very hard for him there. And I wasn't really Swedish any more... When once you've been very happy in childhood, Raoul, it doesn't do to try to go back. We learnt that together, you and I."

He'd started to say something, and then stopped. His hand gripped again over the end of his cane in what was clearly a habitual gesture, and tightened. I hadn't meant to hurt him.

"Raoul, I—"

He'd been studying his own shirt cuffs as if fascinated all of a sudden; now he looked up. "We're not children any more, Christine, and I'll ask anyway... I can't afford much, but my rooms are clean, and if you wanted to spend a few days quietly in Paris, away from the crowds at the big hotels—"

"Raoul de Chagny!" I made a joke of it, to soften the rejection. "Did I just hear you make me an indelicate proposition?"

On the off-chance that it was true, it needed to be nipped in the bud as soon as possible; I wasn't sure quite what he'd had in mind, and suspected he wasn't either.

I got up, with a glance at the little statue of the Virgin where Laure's bouquet had been laid in reverence. The girl's voice floated in from outside, happy and excited. I made my words as gentle as I could.

"Dear old friend... it wouldn't work. I still have a very jealous suitor: my art. Scales at eight o'clock in the morning — remember?"

To my relief I got a rueful look in response. "All too vividly, my dearest wife."

"If ever I come to live in Paris, I'll buy a luxurious villa on the outskirts according to tradition, alongside all the aristocrats' cast-offs... and we'll meet every Friday for tea with Gustave and Laure, and all their little Christines and Raouls." I let a touch of mischief enter my eyes. "And you can bring your daughter."

... It was a long time since I'd seen him go quite so scarlet as _that_.

My little shaft had caught him off-balance in the act of trying to rise to his feet, bearing heavily on the cane: it was hard to watch, and when I held out my arm he took it without hesitation, letting me take his weight as he braced himself. At least we didn't have to meet one another's gaze.

"We need to find the others," he said stiffly after a moment, settling the stick at his side. "I ought to get Mère Brassard back to the station — the fly calls at three—"

I slipped my hand through his free arm, remorseful at having spoilt the mood. "I'll help you find her. I'm sure Laure still—"

But he demurred with a shake of the head. "Dear Christine, I think she finds you a little overwhelming. Better if I go alone."

"Then it's goodbye — or au revoir." I pulled back and looked up at him, a little anxious. "Promise me you'll write soon. We must see each other more often... best of friends."

"Every Friday," Raoul said gravely. He opened his arms with a diffident air, offering an embrace if I cared to take it.

I hesitated a moment; then stepped forward to kiss his cheek as his hold tightened around me. I was no longer the slip of a girl who'd fitted so easily against his side, and I was all too conscious of his stick... but his arm hugged closely round my shoulders, and I put both of mine around him and squeezed back, burying my face in his coat.

"Best of friends," Raoul said with a smile as I released him, straightening my hat, and I gave him a grateful look.

"Raoul, if I—" I didn't know how to ask it without wounding his pride. "If I send you the fare as well as tickets for my next performance, will you come?"

But he laughed, without a trace of resentment. "Send me your scarf, Christine Daaé — and I'll bring it back."

I watched him walk out of my life again with a little pang for the years we'd lost; but we'd both found peace, and an affection we could share. And next month — Raoul's fair head caught the sunlight as he paused to go down the steps — next month I opened in Venezia, at La Fenice.

And there was a red scarf at the bottom of my drawer.

_FIN_

* * *

_Author's Note: As I mentioned at the start, this story was written in direct response to a challenge... it's probably about time I came clean and divulged exactly what the terms of the challenge were! __**'Alright lovelies, this is for all the shippers and romantics out there. I'm calling this challenger "Operation Beautiful Ocean Depths"! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a fic that believably sinks your favourite ship! No cheating with tragedies either... or jumping ships either. Both your characters must walk away happy, whole, and very single.'**_

_But ruling out 'cheating with tragedies or jumping ships' in that particular context, of course, happens to offer the implications of a happier outcome for both characters..._

_Believable? I think so. Single? - more or less... Whole? Yes, in what matters. Happy... that, at least, I can give._


End file.
